"How is policy made in America? Official liars tell lies to gullible NY Times
reporters and expect the public to believe
them," by Otto, 2004 [paraphrased from Karl Kraus, die Fackel (The
Torch), Vienna, 1899-1935.]

DECEMBER 14, 2004

Professional Liars Lie To Us About Lying

e get a reliable clue to the spin of the appended Pentagon
"quality of life" piece when the writers lead it with the phrase "hearts
and minds" without quotation marks.

This phrase lives in infamy in the English language because of its use
by Lyndon Johnson in the mid-sixties in a speech he made in which he
said America's only goal in Vietnam was to "win the hearts and minds of
the Vietnamese people" at the same time he was setting in motion the
military and logistical machinery to drop millions of tons of high
explosives, napalm, and defoliant on that tiny country and that would
ultimately cost it the lives of 2 million of its people.

For those who didn't get the message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Vietnam proved once more the blind, savage, and insatiable cruelty that
the US and its arsenal of unlimited destruction is capable of.

Well, besides blind, savage, and insatiable cruelty, all the machinery
of death and destruction that several trillion dollars can buy, a military
budget that exceeds that of most of the rest of the world put together, a
Congress that can't say no, and an in-bedded media establishment, it turns
out that it's still not enough! Something's missing, some essential
ingredient, if America is to prevail in this latest war. It turns out,
says this article, that they need to lie too.

I thought they already did that. No? What happened to the WMD lie and
the Iraq-al-Qaeda-911-connection lie? It's already a truism, that every
population in every war in modern times has been mobilized to kill and die
by being told lies. The only interesting question is why the people
haven't caught on yet.

Why are the liars splitting hairs about "battlefield" lies leaking back
to their precious cannon fodder at home? In America's latest war, the one
right after the War on Communism, the Commander in Chief has already told
us that the "terrorists" are everywhere and so the whole world is now the
battlefield. So I'm certain that the CinC can find a Whitehouse lawyer
who will tell him that, because of the new world situation, it's now
perfectly legal to ignore the old moral constraints, even in Washington,
DC.

And what Pentagon saint does the Times quote to wrap up this piece on agonizing moral introspection in the Army? A
certain Mr. Lawrence Di Rita whose performance in a recent Military
Veracity Marathon event they forgot to look up. I'll do it for them.

Mr. Di Rita now:

Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, says that even though the
government is wrestling with these issues, the standard is still to tell
to [sic] the truth.

"Our job is to put out information to the public that is accurate,"
he said, "and to put it out as quickly as we can."

And
here's Mr. Di Rita on May 15, 2004, immediately after The New
Yorker published Seymour Hersh's revelations on the the torture of
Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison:

"The article in this weeks New Yorker Magazine by Seymour Hersh is
based on what appears to be a single anonymous source that makes
dramatically false assertions. The burden of proof for these false
claims rests upon the reporter."

"These assertions on activities at Abu Ghraib, and the abuse of Iraqi
detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and
anonymous conjecture."

[You can read this official DoD press release (No. 458-04) at www.defenselink.mil
or on this site.]

If Di Rita has pangs of conscience about having to lie, he's like an
amputee complaining about a pain in a limb he doesn't have.

The failure of the Times to provide context for the assertions of
officials it quotes when that context might undermine their message
indicates unmistakably that the Times is a witting conduit for official
propaganda.

Given the evil Strangeloves that run this show, I don't think they have
the slightest concern about the immorality of lying to their own people.
They've long ago passed that milestone on the road to hell. What they're
really worried about is that the fine-tuned, handcrafted lies they come up
with for, say the Iraqi Resistance, might be counterproductive on the home
front. Who knows but that this handcrafted stuff might be so finely tuned
that a misplaced comma could lead to some of that native blind, savage,
and insatiable cruelty being mistakenly vented on the Strangeloves
themselves.

All speculation aside, this whole article is so far-fetched that I
think the liars are lying about lying.

OTTO

December 13, 2004

HEARTS AND
MINDS

Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena

By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

ASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Pentagon is engaged in bitter,
high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or
manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense
Department civilians and military officers say.

Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive techniques
endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them
for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations.

Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the
Pentagon's credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience
skeptical of anything the Defense Department and military say - a repeat
of the credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.

The efforts under consideration risk blurring the traditional lines
between public affairs programs in the Pentagon and military branches -
whose charters call for giving truthful information to the media and the
public - and the world of combat information campaigns or psychological
operations.

The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an
official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad. But
in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any
misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American
news outlets.

The military has faced these tough issues before. Nearly three years
ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, under intense criticism, closed
the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, a short-lived operation to
provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists
in an effort to influence overseas opinion.

Now, critics say, some of the proposals of that discredited office are
quietly being resurrected elsewhere in the military and in the Pentagon.

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say
that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting
news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web
sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the
influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American
principles.

Some of those are in the Middle Eastern and South Asian countries like
Pakistan, still considered a haven for operatives of Al Qaeda. But such a
campaign could reach even to allied countries like Germany, for example, where some mosques
have become crucibles for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the military's vast electronic-warfare
arsenal was used to single out certain members of Saddam Hussein's inner
circle with e-mail messages and cellphone calls in an effort to sway them
to the American cause. Arguments have been made for similar efforts to be
mounted at leadership circles in other nations where the United States is not at war.

During the cold war, American intelligence agencies had journalists on
their payrolls or operatives posing as journalists, particularly in
Western Europe, with the aim of
producing pro-American articles to influence the populations of those
countries. But officials say that no one is considering using such tactics
now.

Suspicions about disinformation programs also arose in the 1980's when
the White House was accused of using such a campaign to destabilize Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.

In the current debate, it is unclear how far along the other programs
are or to what extent they are being carried out because of their largely
classified nature.

Within the Pentagon, some of the military's most powerful figures have
expressed concerns at some of the steps taken that risk blurring the
traditional lines between public affairs and the world of combat
information operations.

These tensions were cast into stark relief this summer in Iraq when
Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, approved the
combining of the command's day-to-day public affairs operations with
combat psychological and information operations into a single "strategic
communications office."

In a rare expression of senior-level questions about such decisions,
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a
memorandum warning the military's regional combat commanders about the
risks of mingling the military public affairs too closely with information
operations.

"While organizations may be inclined to create physically integrated
P.A./I.O. offices, such organizational constructs have the potential to
compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public," it
said.

But General Myers's memorandum is not being followed, according to
officers in Iraq, largely because commanders there believe they are safely
separating the two operations and say they need all the flexibility
possible to combat the insurgency.

Indeed, senior military officials in Washington say public affairs
officers in war zones might, by choice or under pressure, issue statements
to world news media that, while having elements of truth, are clearly
devised primarily to provoke a response from the enemy.

Administration officials say they are increasingly troubled that a
nation that can so successfully market its cars and colas around the
world, even to foreigners hostile to American policies, is failing to sell
its democratic ideals, even as the insurgents they are battling are
spreading falsehoods over mass media outlets like the Arab news satellite
channel Al Jazeera.

"In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is clearly
using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job
is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception
management," said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita.

The battle lines in this debate have been drawn in a flurry of
classified studies, secret operational guidance statements and internal
requests from Mr. Rumsfeld. Some go to the concepts of information
warfare, and some complain about how the government's communications are
organized.

The fervent debate today is focused most directly on a secret order
signed by Mr. Rumsfeld late last year and called "Information Operations
Roadmap." The 74-page directive, which remains classified but was
described by officials who had read it, accelerated "a plan to advance the
goal of information operations as a core military competency."

Noting the complexities and risks, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered studies to
clarify the appropriate relationship between Pentagon and military public
affairs - whose job is to educate and inform the public with accurate and
timely information - and the practitioners of secret psychological
operations and information campaigns to influence, deter or confuse
adversaries.

In response, one far-reaching study conducted at the request of the
strategic plans and policy branch of the military's Joint Staff recently
produced a proposal to create a "director of central information." The
director would have responsibility for budgeting and "authoritative
control of messages" - whether public or covert - across all the
government operations that deal with national security and foreign policy.

The study, conducted by the National Defense University, was presented
Oct. 20 to a panel of senior Pentagon officials and military officers,
including Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy,
whose organization set up the original Office of Strategic Influence.

No senior officer today better represents the debate over a changing
world of military information than Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an operational
commander chosen to be the military's senior spokesman in Iraq after major
combat operations shifted to counterinsurgency operations in the spring of
2003.

His role rankled many in the military's public affairs community who
contend that the job should have gone to someone trained in the doctrine
of Army communications and public affairs, rather than to an officer who
had spent his career in combat arms.

"This is tough business," said General Kimmitt, who now serves as
deputy director of plans for the American military command in the
Middle East. "Are we
trying to inform? Yes. Do we offer perspective? Yes. Do we offer military
judgment? Yes. Must we tell the truth to stay credible? Yes. Is there a
battlefield value in deceiving the enemy? Yes. Do we intentionally deceive
the American people? No."

The rub, General Kimmitt said, is operating among those sometimes
conflicting principles.

"There is a gray area," he said. "Tactical and operational deception
are proper and legal on the battlefield." But "in a worldwide media
environment," he asked, "how do you prevent that deception from spilling
out from the battlefield and inadvertently deceiving the American
people?"

Mr. Di Rita said the scope of the issue had changed in recent years.
"We have a unique challenge in this department," he said, "because
four-star military officers are the face of the United States abroad in
ways that are almost unprecedented since the end of World War II."

He added, "Communication is becoming a capability that combatant
commanders have to factor in to the kinds of operations they are
doing."

Much of the Pentagon's work in this new area falls under a relatively
unknown field called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy. This new phrase
is used to describe the Pentagon's work in governmentwide efforts to
communicate with foreign audiences but that is separate from support for
generals in the field.

At the Pentagon, that effort is managed by Ryan Henry, Mr. Feith's
principal deputy for policy.

"With the pace of technology and such, and with the nature of the
global war on terrorism, information has become much more a part of
strategic victory, and to a certain extent tactical victory, than it ever
was in the past," Mr. Henry said.

However, a senior military officer said that without clear guidance
from the Pentagon, the military's psychological operations, information
operations and public affairs programs are "coming together on the
battlefield like never before, and as such, the lines are blurred." This
has led to a situation where "proponents of these elements jockey for
position to lead the overall communication effort," the officer said.

Debate also continues over proposed amendments to a classified Defense
Department directive, titled "3600.1: Information Operations," which would
lay down Pentagon policy in coming years. Previous versions of the
directive allow aggressive information campaigns to affect enemy leaders,
but not those of allies or even neutral states. The current debate is over
proposed revisions that would widen the target audience for such
missions.

Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, says that even though the
government is wrestling with these issues, the standard is still to tell
to the truth.

"Our job is to put out information to the public that is accurate," he
said, "and to put it out as quickly as we can."